The best Discord welcome and onboarding bots

Welcome messages are free on almost every multipurpose bot, and MEE6 is the exception — they are one of the 31 crossed rows on its own 37-row free table. The real differences sit next to the message: whether auto-roles are free, whether the image card costs anything, and whether the bot names the invite someone joined through.

The three parts of onboarding, and why they get bought separately

“Welcome bot” is one phrase covering three jobs, and the bots that are good at one are frequently absent on the others.

The greeting. A message when someone joins — plain text, an embed, or a generated image card with the member’s avatar on a background. This is the cheap part; almost everyone gives it away.

Automatic roles. Handing every new member a role on arrival, or handing a specific role based on which invite link they used. Join roles are usually free; invite-based and delayed roles are usually not.

Attribution. Which invite brought them, who created it, and whether the people that invite brought are still here in a month. This is a separate product category with its own specialists, and it is where the money is.

How this ranking was built, and what it is not weighted by

Every capability and price below was read from the vendor’s own page or documentation on 30 August 2026. Four criteria:

• Whether the greeting is free, since it is the reason people install the bot.
• What auto-role mechanisms are included, and which of them are gated.
• Whether the image card costs anything.
• What happens on leave — a goodbye message, and whether roles are restored if the member returns.

It is not weighted by install count. It is also not weighted by embed styling, which is the thing screenshots compare and the thing nobody notices after week one.

The comparison

Invite Tracker — the specialist, and the one thing no all-in-one bot does

If the question is “where are our members actually coming from”, this is the answer. Invite Tracker attributes each join to an invite and an inviter, and then keeps following them — it reports retention of invited members, not just the count at the door. That second half is what separates it from every bot that prints “invited by @someone” in a welcome message.

Free gives you 30 days of analytics, 3 auto-roles, 3 blacklisted users, 5 giveaways, 3 ticket panels, 30-day transcripts and one honeypot channel. Premium is €4.99/month, and the vendor is explicit that it is per server rather than per user. CSV export is premium only, which is the universal paywall in Discord analytics — Statbot does the same.

Thirty days is also the number to remember generally: Invite Tracker, Statbot and Koya all land on a 30-day free analytics window independently. Anything quarter-over-quarter costs money in this market.

Verdict: the pick if attribution is the point. Overkill if you only want a greeting.

ProBot — a generous free package in the mainstream set

Free welcome messages, free image cards, free auto-roles, free goodbye, and — the reason it is worth naming here — free text and voice leveling 0–100, plus 11 automod filters, 24+ log events, temp voice, colour roles, starboard and tickets with transcripts. Tier 1 is $5/month or $40/year, Tier 2 $10/month or $80/year, and what payment buys is VIP protection, anti-raid and a personalised bot rather than anything on this page.

ProBot ranks 14th in Discord’s own Moderation and Tools ordering, seven places above MEE6, which is a useful calibration on how little ranking tells you about generosity — see the most popular Discord bots.

Verdict: if you want one free bot that greets, levels and moderates, ProBot is the broadest of the well-known names.

MEE6 — the one that charges for the greeting

MEE6’s welcome plugin is paid. So are XP and Levels, Moderation, Custom commands, Reaction Roles and Giveaways — 31 crosses on its own 37-row table, triple-confirmed against its pricing page and its own support-portal article. List price is $11.99/month, $49.99/year or $89.99 lifetime, per server. A 50%-off promotion was running on 30 August 2026 showing $5.99 — that is a first month, and it renews at $11.99.

Verdict: there is no version of this where paying for a welcome message is the right call. Every other bot on this page includes one.

Where Vetox fits

Vetox splits welcoming into three surfaces rather than one, which is the part that turns out to matter once a server is busy.

Welcome and goodbye are full messages in one of three formats: plain text, a Discord embed, or a multi-component “advanced” layout. Either can carry a generated image card built from a background image, the member’s avatar, their name and a line of text, rendered on Vetox’s own media service. Plain text and the image card are free on Starter; the embed and advanced formats require Basic at $4.99/month. Messages take variables for the member mention, the server name, the member count and the inviter, so a free-tier welcome can name who brought the person in without a separate invite-tracking bot.

Greet is the third surface and the one that does not exist elsewhere: a short, self-deleting mention posted to several channels at once, on a fixed auto-delete timer. The reason it exists is specific — a full welcome card in a busy general channel is clutter, and a welcome channel nobody reads is theatre. Greet puts a disappearing ping where the conversation actually is, and leaves the card in the channel built for it. Five greet channels on Starter, fifteen at Basic.

Auto-roles are four separate mechanisms, and the free/paid line is worth stating exactly because it is easy to get wrong. Join roles — for humans and for bots — are free, unlimited and ungated on every tier, with no count limit anywhere in the configuration. The three that require Basic are invite-based assignment (a role set matched to the specific invite code the member joined through), sticky roles (a member’s roles are snapshotted when they leave and restored if they come back) and delayed roles (granted a set number of minutes after the join).

Sticky roles are the one to know about. The usual failure — a long-standing member leaves in a huff, comes back, and has lost every role they earned — is a support ticket in most servers and a non-event with a snapshot.

Around it sits the rest of the arrival path on the same configuration surface: unlimited self-role panels free on Starter, a /colors name-colour picker free, and 148 log event types covering joins, leaves and role changes so you can see what the onboarding actually did. The free-tier comparison puts that against the rest of the category.

Which one to install

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free Discord welcome bot? Most of them. Dyno, Carl-bot, ProBot, Koya, Atlas, Circle, Loritta, Arcane and Vetox all include welcome messages on the free tier. MEE6 is the notable exception — welcome messages sit behind its premium plan alongside 30 other features.

Which welcome bot has free image cards? ProBot and Vetox both generate a welcome image from a background, the member’s avatar and their name at no cost. Vetox’s card is free on Starter alongside plain text; its embed and advanced message formats require Basic at $4.99/month.

Can a bot give roles based on which invite someone used? Yes, and it is usually a paid feature. Vetox calls it invite-based assign roles and gates it at Basic; Invite Tracker builds its whole product around invite attribution with 3 auto-roles free. Plain join roles — everyone gets the same role — are free almost everywhere.

What happens to a member’s roles if they leave and rejoin? By default they lose everything. Sticky roles fix it by snapshotting roles on leave and restoring them on rejoin. Vetox includes sticky roles at Basic. Very few bots in this comparison ship the mechanism at all, and it is worth checking before you build a role structure people can lose.

How many welcome channels should a server have? One dedicated channel for the full message, and a lightweight mention wherever the conversation actually is. That split is the reason Vetox separates greet from welcome — five greet channels on the free tier means arrivals are visible in the busy channels without turning them into a wall of join cards.

Do I need a separate bot for verification? Only if screening is a real problem. Captcha.bot gives one verified role free at $4.99/month or $55/year for five, and Double Counter is the only bot we found that genuinely links two accounts to one person. Everything else screens attributes — account age, avatar, username shape — which is a different capability with a different failure mode.

Method

Every capability, gate and price above was read from the vendor’s own page or documentation on 30 August 2026, not from another comparison article. MEE6’s free-tier gating was read by decoding the tick and cross icons on its client-rendered pricing page and confirmed against its own support article. Claims scoped as “of the bots we checked” cover the sixteen all-in-one bots and fourteen utility bots examined, not Discord’s full catalogue.